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Sustainable Resourse Developement Minister Diana McQueen and Bill Sweeney talk to media about the new Wildfire Report at the Provincial Legislature in Edmonton on May 18, 2012.

Photograph by: John Lucas
, edmontonjournal.com

EDMONTON - The province needs better communications to co-ordinate wildfire fighting efforts around populated areas, says the chair of a committee that reviewed the handling of last year’s devastating Slave Lake fires.

It should also consider establishing thresholds to trigger earlier evacuation alerts, Bill Sweeney said Friday at the legislature.

Alberta Environment and Sustainable Resource Development (ESRD) must be poised to communicate quick decisions in the “new reality” created by Alberta’s longer and more volatile fire season, he said as the committee report was released.

“All of these things have to be instant. They can’t take time. In the Slave Lake situation, that was problematic,” Sweeney said.

“On May 15, when things went bad, they went bad quickly ... I think people in the community should have had more information than they did receive.”

Sweeney and wildfire behaviour specialist Dennis Quintilio, who provided technical expertise about the fire, suggested the province could look at establishing an early-alert system that warns residents to be ready to leave.

There should be “thresholds for alert,” Quintilio said.

“I think it would be straightforward to establish these thresholds, and they may be different community by community.”

The advice to revamp wildfire communications and incident-management plans came as part of 21 recommendations from the wildfire review committee, an independent group the province established last year.

The committee examined circumstances around three wildfires that burned 22,000 hectares in the Lesser Slave Lake area, including the fire discovered May 14, 2011, that destroyed more than 500 homes and businesses in the town of Slave Lake and caused about $742 million in damage.

A complex set of circumstances led to the destruction, including winds up to 100 kilometres an hour that whipped fire through an aging forest full of fast-burning wood such as black spruce trees, Quintilio said.

“This aging forest which I’ve described, it’s only getting older … and in Alberta we’re building into the forest area probably more aggressively than most,” he said.

“It just sets us up for more of these catastrophic events. So the conclusion is the 2011 fire season may well be the forerunner of future fire seasons.”

Five days of sustained 50-kilometre-an-hour to 60-kilometre-an-hour winds fanned the Slave Lake fire and showered the area with red-hot embers, Quintilio said.

“I went back (in weather records) to 1974 and could not find five consecutive days that were anywhere near that windy.”

To fight the voracious blaze, the province relied on an incident-command model that has worked well for past wildfires, but a different strategy is needed to handle fires where forested areas and urban centres meet, Sweeney said.

The province needs immediate connections to local government officials, emergency-response organizations such as police, municipal firefighting teams, hospitals, nursing homes and other groups, he said.

That is particularly important as more housing is built in forested areas, meaning fires can quickly spread into communities, he said.

“They’re happening in people’s back yards,” Sweeney said. “Our propane, our gas, our house, the mulch in our gardens, the firewood that we put under our decks — all of this is fuel that is new for fires in terms of wildland fires.”

Slave Lake Mayor Karina Pillay-Kinnee said the comprehensive wildfire review should help protect communities, particularly if communications are improved.

“Our last briefing was that the fire wasn’t going to hit our community and then all of a sudden, within an hour or half an hour, we saw the winds pick up, power went down, the radio station went down and cell service was overloaded, so it was just extraordinary that all that happened at once,” Pillay-Kinnee said.

“It was very complicated to keep communication lines open to our residents and understand what was happening on the ground.”

The municipal district of Lesser Slave River faced similar problems, Reeve Denny Garratt said.

“We have to get this information from ESRD in a timely and appropriate fashion so we can make the necessary calls to evacuate people.”

The wildfire review committee recommended the government issue fire weather advisories that warn how a fire might behave.

Government should also beef up first-response firefighting crews and have them ready to deploy earlier during fire season, with some experts working on prevention in the off-season.

The province should make smart investments in fire prevention, including by boosting participation in the already established FireSmart program that teaches people how to reduce fire hazards and protect their homes from wildfire, the report said.

Alberta Environment and Sustainable Resource Development Minister Diana McQueen said the province has already made some of the suggested changes.

That includes spending $20 million on FireSmart projects in the Slave Lake region, updating FireSmart community plans and starting the wildfire season a month earlier, on March 1, McQueen said.

As well, the province trained 100 new firefighters for duty this year.

Critics have argued emergency crews could have saved more homes and businesses with different decisions.

However, the review committee concluded provincial staff made the best decisions they could under difficult conditions, Sweeney said.

The wildfire review committee report is available on the ESRD website.

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